Prof. Dr. Barbara Thériault

Curriculum Vitae

Barbara Thériault is a professor at the Département de sociologie and at the Centre canadien d'études allemandes et européennes (CCEAE), Université de Montréal. She is responsible for the “Feuilleton” section of the journal “Sociologie et sociétés”. She holds a doctorate from the Max Weber-Kolleg für sozial- und kulturwissenschaftliche Studien at the University of Erfurt and Brussels and a habilitation from the European University Viadrina Frankfurt (Oder).

She teaches classical sociology in Montreal and translates German feuilletons into French (Georg Simmel, Norbert Elias, Joseph Roth, Siegfried Kracauer, Kurt Tucholsky).

At the interface between sociology, literature and reportage, she is currently leading the “Kracauer Project”, which consists of two complementary levels: the examination of sociological writing and the empirical study, an ethnography of a medium-sized East German city.
In 2018, she was city writer in Lviv, Ukraine.

Current projects

At the interface between sociology, literature and reportage, the “Kracauer Project” consists of two complementary levels: the examination of sociological writing and the empirical study, an ethnography of a medium-sized East German city.

The first level deals with sociological forms. Based on an intensive reading of the feuilletons published in newspapers in German-speaking countries in the 1920s and 1930s, a form of experimental sociology is considered that combines empiricism and theory in an elegant and entertaining way. The project is based on the following hypothesis: in the combination of sociology, literature and reportage, the hybrid form of the feuilleton and the newspapers in which they were published represent one of the birthplaces of sociology. Their rediscovery, I argue, offers great potential for sociological thinking and writing today.

This level of the research program introduces the texts of the first generation of sociologists, especially those of Georg Simmel and their successors in the 1920s and early 1930s, such as Siegfried Kracauer. This shows what sociology could have become - and could still become.

The second level of the research program is an ethnography of Erfurt. Using interviews and everyday observations, I am investigating the lifestyles, attitudes and questions of meaning of a group of people, those representatives of a class who today define themselves as middle class and are essentially occupied with family and work as well as sport or art. By publishing the results of the study in the form of a book based on a collection of feuilletons, the first level of the research program is pragmatically implemented. As a collection of short and entertaining texts, the intended book can be made accessible to a wide audience without losing the scientific and sociological claim.

During my time at the Max-Weber-Kolleg, I also translated the 15 texts in the appendix of Siegfried Kracauer's Streets in Berlin and Elsewhere into French.

Completed projects

The „Conservative Revolutionaries“: The Protestant and Catholic Churches in East Germany after Radical Political Change

funded by the Jutta Heidemann Foundation | Link

• Thériault, Barbara. "Selfies, soziologische Formeln und Koketterien: Simmels Einfluss auf die ‘Zeitungssoziologie’ in den 1920er und 1930er Jahren", ZYKLOS 5. Jahrbuch für Theorie und Geschichte der Soziologie 2019, p. 179-191.
• Thériault, Barbara. "Max Weber, Life Conduct and Contemporary Existential Cultures". In The Oxford Handbook of Max Weber, Hanke, Edith, Scaff, Lawrence et Sam Whimster (dir.), Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2019,
• Thériault, Barbara and Thomas Schmidt-Lux. "Siegfried Kracauer und die Kultursoziologie". In Handbuch Kultursoziologie. Band 1: Begriffe – Kontexte – Perspektiven – Autor_innen, Moebius, Stephan, Nungesser, Frithjof et Katharina Scherke (dir.), Wiesbaden, Springer, 2019, 511-518.
• Thériault, Barbara and Rosalie Dion. "Weber and Simmel on the sociological form (transcription of a round of ‘Sociology, the game’)", Journal of Classical Sociology, 2017, 17(2), p. 156-170.